The Credeaux Canvas
About art, its practitioners, purchasers, and parasites; and about
the heart, its convolutions, connivances, and convulsions. It is
even inexpensive to put on. So only the total blindness and deafness
of producers can explain why Keith Bunin's perceptive, witty, bittersweet
play did not transfer.

Elaine Stritch: At Liberty Stritch is only one woman, but what she did or didn't do
-- her triumphs and bloopers -- seems to cover 50 years of our theatrical
history. She is by turns rib-tickling, gut-splitting, and heart-wrenching.
Lobby Hero Even second-best Kenneth Lonergan has all of Neil
Simon's wit along with a surer sense of construction, a finer ear
for how we talk now, and an unsentimental but compassionate feel
for confused but endearing bumblers.

The Spitfire Grill Here, alas, the reviewers were at fault for not
spotting, under some minor imperfections, an intimate musical whose
heart and ear were very much in the right place. Simplifying the
movie on which it was based, this tale about second chances and
overcoming small-town prejudice would have been a genuine crowd-pleaser.

The Syringa Tree A one-woman show whose author-performer, Pamela
Gien, managed to encapsulate a world: the grim history of apartheid
as seen through the eyes of a bright little white girl growing into
a brilliant young woman.

Losers

Chuckmeesery
You can count on Charles L. Mee for pretentious, hollow, kinky leachings
off Greek drama or second-childhood pornography in his pseudo-trilogy
First Love, True Love, and Big Love.

Harold Pinter Retrospective H.P. is not only a phony in himself but also the cause of
phoniness in his epigones. Clever productions and good acting, imported
from England, should not disguise Pinter's emptiness, mean-spiritedness,
and tiresome repetitiveness.

The Play About the Baby There is a good Albee, but this was by Edward's
worthless twin, with nothing up his sleeve except obfuscatory arrogance.
It is all meaningless attitudinizing; not only were there no new
clothes, there wasn't even an emperor.

Thou Shalt Not Zola's novel -- material unfit for a musical --
brought out the worst in everyone involved: The oppressive claustrophobia
of the tale was not so much conveyed as imposed on the viewer.

Topdog/Underdog Two gifted actors (Don Cheadle and Jeffrey Wright)
do not a winner make. Suzan-Lori Parks's play about two brothers
and three-card monte was itself a con game.